By Dave Andrusko
What’s “new” is that after squirming out of giving any substantive interviews for five weeks, pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris has finally agreed (at the last minute—she did sort of promise to do an interview this month) to have CNN’s Dana Bash interview her.
With a couple of caveats, of course.
One, it will be taped Thursday afternoon and aired that night; two, her sidekick—pro-abortion Gov. Tim Walz—will join her. No solo flying yet for the woman who wants to be our 47th President.
As the New York Times wrote today, “The joint interview, airing at 9 p.m. Eastern, is the first time the vice president will face sustained questions from a journalist since President Biden withdrew from the race.”
Pro-abortion Tim Walz and Kamala Harris
Photo: Gage Skidmore
CC BY-SA 2.0
It’s amusing (to put it mildly) that AOL would give such a different headline to a story from ABC News: “Harris expected to face tough questioning in 1st Sitdown interview Thursday.” ABC News’s own headline was more modest: “Harris and Walz agree to joint sit-down interview airing Thursday on CNN.”
There are a few comments in the ABC News story written by Will McDuffie, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, and Fritz Farrow that accuse those rascally Republicans of hounding her with charges that she’s trying to “duck and hide” from the press. That this is 100% true is one of those “so what?” statement.
As ABC News said (barely stifling a yawn), “The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris.”
But ABC News did ever-so-slightly plow some very fertile ground, assuming Bash would till it:
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s mental fitness prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Finally, Politico’s Playbook has a very interesting twist:
What about Tim? One of the issues that Harris world is currently working to address is how to deploy running mate Tim Walz in the media. The danger in sending him out to do big solo interviews is that he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue. As someone pointed out to us last night, Harris talks about the “opportunity economy,” but if Walz were asked to define it, would he know how?
How indeed.
As you might expect, National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty was far less sympathetic. His harsh conclusion:
For now, Harris is more feebly insecure in her own reasoning than Biden was insensate in his. Just as electing a clearly incapable Biden meant that unnamed aides were usurping executive authority, so electing Harris means throwing the most powerful office in the world to the wind.